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Congratulations to Jack Oyston of the University of Bath for winning one of our book tokens for the best student talk at the Palaeontological Association Annual Meeting held in December. The book you requested will be winging its way to you shortly. The details of Jack's talk are as follows: What limits the morphological disparity of clades?*Jack W. Oyston(1), Martin Hughes(2), Peter J. Wagner(3), Sylvain Gerber(4) & Matthew A. Wills(1)1-University of Bath, UK, 2-Natural History Museum, London, UK, 3-Smithsonian Institution, USA, 4-University of Cambridge, UKABSTRACT Variation in form within clades is decoupled from estimates of diversity.  Specifically, groups tend to...

As is often the case with published works, some errors do creep in that are not noticed until the book has been printed. The purpose of this blog post is to correct two small errors in our monograph on British Polacanthid Dinosaurs by William T. Blows. Click the cover image to go to the product page But first, a couple of weeks ago I took my daughter to the Natural History Museum in London where she was able to get hands on with spikes, plates and other fossilized elements of these remarkable dinosaurs. If you like dinosaurs then the Natural...

We are pleased to announce that our title: Homo sapiens: an appraisal of modern humans by Rajan Jaisinghani has been submitted for the prestigious Royal Society of Biology book awards 2016. We believe that the concluding comments of Richard Vernon's (Secretary of the Oxford Branch of Population Matters) Amazon.co.uk review of January 23, 2016, say it all: "...this is one of the most important books, for humanity, the environment and hence our future, that I have read." It is for this very reason that we kept the RRP at only £12.00 in the hope that it would be accessible to...

We are pleased to announce a nice review of our recent title Dear Sir: Sixty-nine years of Alfred Russel Wallace letters to the editor, edited by Charles H. Smith and Kelsey Patterson, just published in the Entomologist's Monthly Magazine (2016, volume 152, pages 65-66). The concluding statement of the review, by another acclaimed Wallace author and scholar, Ted Benton, reads: "This edited collection must be one of the best ways into the phenomenon that was Wallace, and is a ‘must-read’ for anyone with an interest in the ferment of ideas to which he made such an immense contribution." Clicking the...

Spiders are one of the most diverse groups of animals on Earth today. Indeed, they are exceeded in terms of described numbers of species, only by the five largest insect orders (Coleoptera = beetles, Hemiptera = true bugs, Hymenoptera = ants, bees and wasps, Lepidoptera = butterflies and moths, and Diptera = true flies) and the Acari (mites and ticks). However, it should be remembered that spiders are ALL obligate predators (they all hunt and kill other organisms for food), whereas all the other aforementioned groups encompass multiple feeding strategies (e.g. predators, herbivores, detritivores, parasites, frugivores, etc.). Hence, the global...